Many people come up with ideas for websites that they never get round to executing. Some never get as far as ordering a website hosting service others get their website up but abandon it, despite having spent both time and money on the project. If you are thinking about starting your own site, I've got a few ideas which will help.
1. Be clear about what you want! Before you shell out your hard earned money on a website and hosting look around. There are plenty of options out there for quickly put together web options, so have a look at blogs, social networks, Twitter, Flickr, Jalbum and all the other ways of getting online fast and at no cost (at least for the basic version of the service.)
2. Make sure you set a budget - and don't go above it. Cost in all the things that will be involved including the off-site expensives. If you are planning to link your site to say, Ebay, consider the costs of using their selling service, the cost of postage and packing and the costs associated with stationery. There may be other factors to be considered so make sure you sit down, work out the costs and do not end up spending more than you make. Something that happens more often then you might expect!
3. KISS (Keep it simple, stupid!) A lot of people have ideas that tend to add in everything they can think of. This is usually a recipe for disaster. If your site is a rainbow of colour and a melange of style, take it down, do some research and do it again. I know one well meaning soul who regularly produces site of such eye-watering design and layout that visiting requires sunglasses and transquilisers! Keep your website design simple and make sure you have enough content to keep your website going. Avoid doing complex stuff right from the start like adding video features or twelve sub-categories of news items, doing too much too soon is one quick way down the road to have a site that is either abandoned as too complicated or become impossible to navigate. If the aim is to have people, makes sure they don't get lost.
4. Encourage criticism, Especially the useful stuff, bad coding, typographical errors and paragraphs which don't make sense. Avoid the naysayers and the it will never work crowd. Someone probably told the Facebook inventors they were wasting their time as well.
5. The content of your site needs to interest you. If its a boring subject you are unlikely to want to update it and your visitors will see that in the site.
6. Biggest is not best. In these cash conscious times, give some serious thought to what you actually need as a hosting plan. How much space do you really need, how many email addresses? Choose what you need, you can always expand later as the site takes off.
7. Design your site so you can update easily. If you are coding in HTML a simple site will be easier to update. It may sound stupid to professional, but make sure all your pages are based on a standard template; images come from one source and sizes are limited to 2 or 3 different fonts - which are supported by browsers. Remember your custom Harry Potter font will only work if the other person has it as well. Do your research and stick to web-safe fonts.
8. Feed me! Websites are like the carnivous plant in "Little Shop of Horrors and they need constant feeding with new stuff. RSS feeds from news sites are one way to keep it fresh, but every now and then get in their do the website equivalent of weeding and planting some new flowers!
9. Best practice. In the business world best practice is about finding the things that other people are doing and copying them to your own business. If a site has something that could be adapted to your benefit use. But don't just rip off what the other guy is doing, take some time to customise it to your own needs.
10. Enjoy it! If you don't, if its a chore ask yourself do I really want to be doing this? If you can't come up with a good answer, walk away.
If you need advice or help with setting up a site email me or contact me through my website www.wanderjahre.co.uk
